Kamaliki Vocational Training Centre wins praise

Kamaliki Vocational Training Centre outside Goroka, Eastern Highlands, has over the years won a reputation for the kind of courses that it teaches and the students that it produces.
The products included baby carriers, cookie trays, fruit bowls, laundry baskets, place mats, round baskets, round trays with handles, shopping baskets and trays.
Kamaliki is known for teaching students about downstream processing skills, appropriate technology and arts and crafts.
These skills are very relevant for rural areas as well as to help the students be self-employed or run their own small businesses.
Downstream processing includes honey, jam, marmalade, peanut butter.
Its appropriate technology students are taught how to make such items as drum ovens, mechanised coconut and tapioca scrapers, as well as many other useful items.
Kamaliki's craft shop - which is open tithe public seven days a week - sells canecraft which it buys from local weavers as well as other items produced by trainees of the centre.
The villagers, many of whom are illiterate, find it hard to get find a market for their quality products so they sell them to the Kamaliki Vocational Centre near Goroka.
The centre's stall at the 2006 PNG Coffee Festival in Goroka on May 4, 5and 6 was a major crowd-puller.
Kamaliki, in fact, won a consolation prize from the Small Business Development Corporation for being one of the outstanding small businesses at the festival.
According to instructor, Mrs. MariaNom, Kamaliki was giving a lot of hope to young school leavers.
The school is located about 10km out-side Goroka on the Lae/Madang side ofthe Highlands Highway.
Kamaliki has been actively involved in providing skills training for students from Eastern Highlands as well as other parts of Papua New Guinea.
The school provides eight courses, and every year, more applications are received but only 210 students are selected.
The students who are not selected are encouraged to take up short courses which the school offers.Kamaliki enrolls students with Grade 8,Grade 10 and Grade 12 qualifications with good passes in core subjects.
It runs two-year courses in motor vehicle mechanic, carpentry and joinery, plumbing, auto electrical, computing and business studies, metal fabricating, metal beating and spray painting, and advanced studies in agriculture.
Short courses are run in various skills trade areas to assist people enhance their skills.
The short courses are in motor mechanics, computing and business studies, home economics, carpentry and joinery, sewing machine and repair/maintenance, block laying, advanced skills in agriculture, animal husbandry, cash crops, technical skills, honey production, and farm management.
Further information can be obtained from the address as follows: Kamaliki Vocational Centre, P.O. Box107, Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.Tel: (675) 7322336Fax: (675) 7322336.